Disneyland Pt. 8

We’ve made it, folks. The very last post of the Jones Family Vacation of 2016. And yes, I’m just as happy as you are that we’re done!

On Saturday, we packed up our Anaheim hotel room and headed to I5 towards San Francisco. This was definitely one of the advantages of having a vehicle versus flying; we got to take a few little detours on the way home.

We stopped off in Santa Barbara at East Beach Tacos (thanks Yelp!) and to our surprise there were batting cages there too. We figured this was a great way for the boys to get some energy out before piling back in the car for 8 hours, and it was completely worth the $20.

Even I went in and got a couple swings in!

We arrived in San Francisco at about 10:00pm. On the way there, I downloaded the app Hotels Tonightfound room at the Mark Twain Hotel. It was a cute boutique hotel, that had 2 double beds and the price was right. But we wouldn’t stay there again…it was super small and for some reason we couldn’t figure out how to turn the heater off and we were SO hot all night. I know it seems like a simple fix: call the front desk and have them come up and turn the heater off. But we were exhausted from driving and at 1am, it seemed more of a possibility to poop out ice cubes than walk downstairs.

We woke up early-ish Sunday morning because we wanted to get the most out of our day. I checked around on Yelp and found Honey Honey Cafe and Creperythat supposedly had one of the best brunches in the area.

And yep. They did.

The wait was about an hour long but the the staff was very kind and worked to turn tables pretty fast.

Huz went with the salmon eggs benedict and I couldn’t make up my mind, so I ordered 2 different kinds of crepes: a sweet and a savory. And sadly, I didn’t get any photos of my crepes because I was too busy stuffing them in my face.

After brunch, we headed downtown to take an official San Francisco trolley ride. And there was a long wait for that as well, but the makeup gods were smiling upon me that day, because the line was right in front of a MAC Pro store. So Huz and the boys waited in line and I spent a healthy portion of our vacation budget on eyeliner.

The trolley took us down to the Fisherman’s Wharf, where we walked around and saw the sea lions. I feel like one of the things the tour guides won’t tell you is how much the sea lions stink. Like, really, really stink. It’s bad.

Our last stop was the Golden Gate Bridge. Aidon had done a report on this bridge at school, so we let him show us around and tell us how it was built, etc. It was so pretty, but little foggy. So much so that our photos look photoshopped. But I swear, we were there.

And that was the very last picture of the trip. After that, we got back in the car and prepared for the 13 hour car ride home. We made the mistake of deciding to take Hwy 1 home, instead of just staying on I5. We thought, oh, it will be pretty, it’ll be different than the way we came down, blah, blah, blah.

Big mistake. Big. Huge.

And here’s why. First, it’s dark outside. Pitch black by the time we got there. So there were no beautiful views to be seen because it’s night time. Second, it was late and sleep was starting to set in, which makes the windy, crazy roads an absolute nightmare. If any of you have ever driven Hwy 1, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, the average speed around those turns is about 15-20mph. And if you accidentally take a curve too fast, oh, it’s fine, the ocean will catch your fall because you’re on a CLIFF. So, yeah, I was a mess the entire time I drove. My neck and shoulders were so tense and all I could think about was how stupid we were to take this route home.

At about 1am Huz made the executive decision to cut back over and get on I5. Once we did that, we were fine. (With a little help from Dutch Brothers Coffee.) And we drove back into Puyallup at around 11am.

So there you have it, our entire Disneyland Trip. It was so much fun and I’m so glad we did it. We’re already planning 2017’s Family Vacation, but this one will be hard to top. 🙂